Precious metals possess unique physical and chemical properties, which are widely used in various fields, such as military industry, petroleum, chemical industry, organic synthesis, microelectronic technology, exhaust gas purifying or the like, and play an irreplaceable role in the modern high-tech industries. If the content of precious metal in the precious metal ore is in the order of gram/ton, the precious metal ore can be classified as a rich ore, and is valuable to be industrially exploited. In some smelting slag produced by pyrometallurgy processing of precious metals, especially in the smelting slag produced by pyrometallurgy processing of copper anode slime and lead anode slime, it is rich in valuable metals such as gold, silver, bismuth and lead. For example, the smelting slag, which is produced by pyrometallurgy processing of copper anode slime and lead anode slime with Kaldo furnace, comprises the components of (by mass): Au ranging from 10 to 1000 g/t, Ag ranging from 0.05 to 4%, Bi ranging from 1 to 10%, Pb of more than 10%, Cu ranging from 0 to 1.5%, Sb ranging from 0 to 4%, and As ranging from 0 to 3%. The smelting slag produced by precious metal of pyrometallurgy processing has a relatively high content of the valuable metals, and is a good raw material for comprehensive recovery of valuable metals such as gold, silver, bismuth, lead or the like, thereby the recycle of precious metal smelting slag is of importance for solving the problem of severe shortage of precious metal resources.
In general, the processes for treating the precious metal smelting slag is that slag returns to the lead smelting system or copper smelting system of smelting plant to further recover gold and silver. However, neither the lead smelting system nor the copper smelting system can realize a comprehensive recovery of precious metals from precious metal smelting slag. For example, the lead smelting system can only recover gold, silver and lead without effective bismuth recovery, meanwhile, with a long recovery time and low recovery rate; the copper smelting system can only recover gold and silver, but fail to recover lead and bismuth, also, returning to the copper smelting system will produce vicious circle formed by lead in the large system, which influences copper smelting system and copper electrolysis system. In addition, the process time is long and the recovery rate is low. The inventors envision providing a process for recovering valuable metals from precious metal smelting slag, comprehensively recovering gold, silver, bismuth and lead in the precious metal smelting slag with a high recovery rate.